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Monday, August 18, 2014

Review: Violette Market Penny Candies (8 scents)

I recently got a bunch of Violette Market's penny candies during their penny candy sale. I also got some samples from Ajevie's decant circle.


I need to make a quick rave about Ajevie's decants. Check out how the little decants arrive!



It's so neat and makes finding the notes so convenient! Angi of Ajevie is also extremely fast when it comes to responding and really friendly. I'm definitely joining in on more decant circles.

So this is what I ordered:

From VM:
  • Coconut Pomelo Cremes Penny Candy
  • Smoked Apple Wood Penny Candy
  • Carrot Cremes Penny Candy
  • Choco Melon Cremes Penny Candy
  • Wood Vanilla Cremes Penny Candy
  • Smoked Cherry Blossom Wood Penny Candy
  • Caramel Sugar Kettle Corn
  • Ceylon Cinnamon Sugar Donuts
  • The Gingerbread House
  • Mexico City
(Sort of) Extras from VM:
  • Smoked Citrus Wood Penny Candy
  • Smoked Chocolate Blackberry Honey Penny Candy
  • Smoking Plum Taffy Pull
  • French Lime Blossom botanical perfume solid
They're not exactly free but they're not exactly paid in full price either..I'll explain below in the Customer Service review section.

From Ajevie, decants of:
  • Choco Melon Cremes Penny Candy
  • Smoked Apple Wood Penny Candy (I initially wanted to wait to try these out first, but the sale happened)
  • Pirate's Cove
  • Granny Smith Cotton Candy

Customer Service


I can't comment on the TAT since my order got a bit complicated and I had to send it to my cousin who doesn't take notes of when she gets her mail.

What I can comment on, is how amazing Lori is. Lori was super friendly and helpful during my entire email exchange, even though I had tons of my shipping questions. I ended up shipping to 2 locations, and they're both different from my Paypal address since Paypal doesn't let Indonesian credit cards pick a non-Indonesian shipping address. She managed to keep track of all that during a sale. I'm happy!

Another thing that really wow-ed me. So obviously I ended up with a shipping difference after changing international shipping to domestic. I also originally ordered Sadbh and she accidentally ran out of it.  Annoying, but it happens during big sales.

I've previously mentioned to her that since refunds don't make sense for me due to international transaction charges, I prefer getting refunded in samples or something. I was only expecting her to only toss in a couple of samples and replace Sadbh with a full bottle of something else to refund me, which would be fair. Instead, she gave me all the extras I mentioned above! Here's the list again:
  • Smoked Citrus Wood Penny Candy
  • Smoked Chocolate Blackberry Honey Penny Candy
  • Smoking Plum Taffy Pull
  • French Lime Blossom botanical perfume solid
It's beyond generous and I'm definitely happy about it. Now this is amazing customer service. I can't even get upset over not getting Sadbh (even though it sounds heavenly).

Oh, and I feel kinda bad about mentioning the solid perfume, because she only made 5 of it, and I got one of them. Not to gloat but, Lori thinks I'm special!!! YAAAYY!!!

Perfume Oils General Review


These scents are strong. They have the strongest sillage I've ever encountered and I learnt not to sniff certain scents too close to the application point since it'll hurt your nose the way air fresheners & certain car perfumes do. For the first 45 minutes to an hour, I can smell it as I'm typing when I put it on my hand. It eventually calms down to about intimate whispering distance, but doesn't get faint until about 2h. You'll still get traces of perfume on your skin over 8-12h later, though by then, the smell is hardly recognizable and often just a vaguely sweet scent. They're bloody strong.

Quality-wise, I'm a fan even though I have some misses. One thing I noticed is that the penny candies don't seem to agree with me unlike the other VM perfumes. On me, a lot of the penny candies end up having that painfully sharp smell you get from very strong car perfumes or air freshener sprayed too close to you. I'm wondering if it's because the sillage is so strong, since the smell wafting around is often pleasant. It's just for the penny candies though, so I'm not sure if it's the candy note going nuts on me.

I also noticed that while they still smell amazing, a lot of gourmand smells end up smelling non-gourmand on me. It could be my skin chemistry, but it's definitely worth noting since, for people with similar skin chemistry as mine, it may come as a surprise when a scent that's supposed to smell edible smells like fresh linens or something.

Since the perfume names kinda give away what they're supposed to smell like, these aren't done blind so I didn't bother with writing an overview.

Carrot Cremes Penny Candy


Oh man! This starts of so well! It smells like frosted carrot cakes, the kind with rich, delicious vanilla frosting. Then, for about 5-30 minutes or so, you'll have to endure a car perfume kind of smell -strong, sharp and hurts your nose. It smells like a vanilla car perfume. But once you power through that stage, it calms down and smells like tempting vanilla & cinnamon cake, but there's a bit of artificial cake instead of the genuine deliciousness I got in the beginning. It's still a great scent, but after you smell the most perfect cake scent ever in the beginning, you can't help but think it's not good enough. By about an hour, this dries down to a vanilla potpourri smell with that metallic drydown I often get from gourmands.

Smoked Apple Wood Penny Candy


Holy crap smoked is right! I first smell only smoke on first whiff, though it mellows out eventually. I smell the wood, but the apple somehow smells like a sweet vaguely apple liqueur to me. It kinda smells like a cinnamon apple potpourri converted into a very sweet liqueur, with the apple bit being drowned out by the potpourri and sweet liqueur.

Maybe I need my midday snack, because this kinda looks delicious..
Image found on thelostogle.com


Choco Melon Cremes Penny Candy

Aww! Initially, this is one of the best chocolate notes I've ever encountered. Smells genuinely like chocolate, and not the cheap kind. There's a melon smell mixed into this too, but the chocolate's the prominent note. The melon is that artificial melon smell like Midoris, but I like that artificial melon smell. Unfortunately, after a while, it smells like a headache inducing, sweet car perfume. The kind that comes in tins and has this waxy thing inside that dries up to look like shrivelled, wrinkled gremlin skin. The dry down is just vaguely sweet and you can't really identify what it is. I wish this would stay the way it smelled for the first 5-10 minutes!

Coconut Pomelo Cremes Penny Candy


Now this starts smelling like a fruity scented hand wash. I think it's because the coconut note they use smell like like sunblock, so the smell kind of makes you think of drugstore products. Then a roomspray sprayed too close to your nose smell comes in. I say room spray instead of car perfume since this scent smells more like something you'd spray in a room. It's pretty nauseating until the sharpness calms down, unfortunately. When it calms down, it smells like a tropical scented roomspray. It smells more like a room than a gourmand, so that's a bit of a surprise. I smell like the bathroom in a nice Newport Beach home.

We may not have a beachfront location but we will make damn sure we smell the way we think a beachfront location smells like!
Image courtesy of styleathome.com


Smoked Cherry Blossom Wood Penny Candy


It smells like cherry blossom and candies! I don't smell the smoked or wood in this, which works out for me since my skin amps up VM's smoke notes so much. And this Not candied cherry blossoms, like sweet, clean cherry blossoms and candies. The result is a smell that's clean and floral yet muddled with sweet, sticky candy. It gets soapy at times and there's a bit of a cloying car perfume smell that threatens to come out, but overall, it stays amazing.

Smoked Chocolate Blackberry Honey Penny Candy


Ok, the initial smell is a BBQ-ed meat smell that freaked me out. I smell something sweet and honey-ish trying to come out but it's just drowned out by the BBQ smell. After about 25 minutes, the sweet honey smell is strong enough to show up, but it's not enough. It smells like someone tried to make honey-baked chicken, left it in the oven too long, now there's smoke all over the place after the fire's put out, and everyone's sheepishly explaining to the fire department what happened. After an hour, the smokiness calmed down but not enough. I smell like this just happened to me:

RIP Robin Williams. Still one of my favourite scenes of all time.
Image courtesy of blogs.kqed.org

I think this is one I'm going to try to age. I smell some delicious blackberry honey in the background, and I think they may surface more after ageing.

Smoked Citrus Wood Penny Candy


At the beginning this smells like a liqueur that would be sickly sweet and slightly medicinal tasting, even though it smells good. There's a smell of orange blossoms, but it's mostly drowned by the liqueur smell. After 10-15 min, there's that sickeningly sweet, sharp shrivelled car air freshener smell if you sniff too near to where you apply it. BUT, If you stay at around casual conversation distance, you get whiffs of delicious candy. The clean, high end ones with unique floral flavours. I actually love this.

Wood Vanilla Cremes Penny Candy

This starts off as sandalwood vanilla. The sandalwood's the prominent smell, so it ends up smelling like creamy sandalwood. Very clean and powdery kind of smell, slightly airy and sharp but creamy enough to anchor it down...the ad for this will definitely have a woman in a white dress prancing around. Actually, I know the perfect picture for an ad for this perfume:
This photographer is seriously talented. I love his work!
Ballet I by Imantas Boiko
It leans towards going soapy at times, but definitely smells like a perfume rather than a soap. As much as I'm in love with this, I was surprised to get a more powdery, clean smell rather than the gourmand I was expecting. I can imagine some people would be a bit disappointed in that.


BONUS: So Violette Market is very, very strong and all the sniffing does give you a bit of a headache. This is how I clear my nose:

Coffee beans stored in an old HoG tub...re-using saves the environment!




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